Oliver Cromwell and the Rule of the Puritans in England

by C. H. Firth

Ever since the eighth, the commissioners for the King’s trial had been meeting in the Painted Chamber to settle their procedure. But nearly half of those named refused to accept the duty laid upon them. Some had fears for their own safety; some, political objections; others objected to the constitution or authority of the court. Algernon Sidney told his colleagues that there were two reasons why he could not take part in their proceedings. First, the King could not be tried by that court; secondly, that no man could be tried by that court. “I tell you,” answered Cromwell, with characteristic scorn of constitutional formulas, “we will cut off his head with the crown upon it.”

Nevertheless, the question of their authority was a question to which the court was bound to agree upon an answer. If a story told at the trial of the Regicides may be trusted, the commissioners were still at a loss for a formula on the morning of the 20th of January, when the trial began. As they sat in the Painted Chamber, news was brought that the King was landing at the steps which led up from the river.

“At which Cromwell ran to the window, looking on the King as he came up the garden; he turned as white as the wall ... then turning to the board said thus: ‘My masters, he is come, he is come, and now we are doing that great work that the whole nation will be full of. Therefore I desire you to let us resolve here what answer we shall give the King when he comes before us, for the first question he will ask us will be by what authority and commission we do try him?’ For a time no one answered. Then after a little space, Henry Marten rose up and said, ‘In the name of the Commons in Parliament assembled and all the good people of England.’”

About one o’clock the court adjourned to Westminster Hall. At the upper or southern end of the Hall, a wooden platform had been constructed, covering all the space usually occupied by the Courts of Chancery and King’s Bench. A wooden partition rising about three feet above the floor of this platform divided the court itself from the body of the Hall. On the lower side of this partition, running across the Hall from side to side, was a broad gangway fenced in by a wooden railing, and a similar gangway ran right down the Hall to the great door. Along the sides of the gangways, with their backs to the railings, stood a line of musketeers and pikemen, whose officers walked up and down the vacant space in the middle of the passages. The mass of the audience stood within the railed spaces between the sides of the Hall and the gangways, but on each side of the court itself, and directly overlooking it, were two small galleries, one above the other, reserved for specially favoured spectators. At the back of the court, immediately under the great window, sat the King’s judges, about seventy in number, ranged on four or five tiers of benches which were covered with scarlet cloth. They wore their ordinary dress as officers or gentlemen. In the back row, on each side of the scutcheon bearing the arms of the Commonwealth of England, sat Cromwell and Harry Marten. In the centre of the front row of the judges, at a raised desk, sat Serjeant John Bradshaw, the president of the court, and on each side of him his assistants, Lisle and Say, dressed in black lawyer’s gowns. About the middle of the floor of the court was a table where the two clerks were seated, and on the table lay the mace and the sword of State. In the front of the court, at the very edge of the platform, were three compartments, somewhat like pews, the backs of which were formed by the low partition separating the court from the Hall. In the central one were a crimson-velvet arm-chair, and a small table covered with Turkey carpet, on which were an inkstand and paper. Here sat the King, and in the partition on his right were the three lawyers who were counsel for the Commonwealth. The King had his face turned towards the president and his back to the crowd in the body of the Hall. As the floor of the court was higher than the floor of the Hall, the spectators stood, as it were, in the pit of a theatre, but the partition somewhat intercepted their view of the interior of the court. Yet they could see the King’s head and shoulders above it.

Charles kept his hat on his head, and showed no sign of respect to the court.

“The prisoner,” says the official account, “while the charge was reading, sat down in his chair, looking sometimes on the High Court, and sometimes on the galleries, and rose again, and turned about to behold the guards and spectators, and after sat down, looking very sternly, and with a countenance not at all moved, till these words ‘Charles Stuart to be a tyrant,’ traitor, etc., were read; at which he laughed, as he sat, in the face of the court.”

Throughout the trial, as the King’s judges had anticipated, he declined to admit the jurisdiction of the court. On each of the three days when he appeared before it, on the 20th, the 22d, and the 23rd of January, he maintained his refusal to plead. “Princes,” he had said in a declaration published in 1629, “are not bound to give an account of their actions but to God alone,” and he now consistently repeated that “a king cannot be tried by any superior jurisdiction on earth.” What excited more sympathy, however, was his association of the rights of his subjects with his own, and his claim to be defending both against the arbitrary power of the army.

“It is not my case alone,” he said; “it is the freedom and liberty of the people of England; and do you pretend what you will, I stand more for their liberties. For if power without law may make laws, may alter the fundamental laws of the kingdom, I do not know what subject he is in England that can be sure of his life, or anything that he calls his own.”

On Tuesday, the 23rd, after Charles had for a third time refused to plead, the court adjourned to the Painted Chamber, and the more determined members resolved to treat the King as contumacious, and proceed to pronounce judgment against him. Others opposed this course, and the next two days were spent in hearing evidence at private meetings of the court in the Painted Chamber—partly in order to gain time whilst the recalcitrant members of the court were being converted. One after another, a number of witnesses deposed that they had seen the King in arms against the Parliament. One had seen the royal standard set up at Nottingham. Another had seen the King at Newbury, in complete armour with his sword drawn, and had heard him exhort a regiment of horse to stand by him that day, for that his crown lay upon the point of the sword. A third swore that he heard Charles encourage his soldiers to strip and beat their prisoners when Leicester was stormed. Documents were also brought to prove the King’s invitations to foreign forces to enter England. At length, on the evening of Thursday, the 25th, a vote that the court would proceed to sentence Charles Stuart to death was procured, and on the morning of the 26th, sixty-two commissioners agreed to the terms of the sentence which their committee had drawn up. It was resolved, however, that the King should be brought before the court to hear his sentence, instead of being condemned in his absence, and this was doubtless done in order to give him a chance to plead, in case he should repent of his contumacy.

On the afternoon of Saturday, January 27th, sixty-seven commissioners took their seats in Westminster Hall, headed by Bradshaw, who had now donned a scarlet gown in which to deliver sentence. Once more Charles refused to plead, requesting that before sentence was given he might be heard before the Lords and Commons assembled in the Painted Chamber. He had something to say, he declared, which was “most material for the welfare of the kingdom and the liberty of the subject.... I am sure on it, it is very well worth the hearing.” It was afterwards rumoured that he meant to propose his own abdication, and the admission of his son to the throne upon such terms as should have been agreed upon. The court after a brief deliberation refused the request, and Bradshaw, after setting forth the prisoner’s crimes and exhorting him to repentance, ordered the clerk to read the sentence. The King strove to speak. “Your time is now past,” replied Bradshaw, and bade the clerk read on. After the sentence was read, all the commissioners stood up to testify their assent. Once more Charles endeavoured to obtain a hearing. “Sir, you are not to be heard after sentence,” was the answer. He still struggled to be heard. “Guard, withdraw your prisoner,” ordered the president. “I am not suffered to speak,” cried the King. “Expect what justice other people will have.”